One, Two, Buckle My Shoe Part 25

The New York Times: 'Here is the grand-manner detective story in all its glory.'

The Bookman: 'Superlative Christie...extremely ingenious.'

Sat.u.r.day Review: 'A sure-fire attention-gripper-naturally.'

35. Third Girl Third Girl (1966) (1966) Hercule Poirot is interrupted at breakfast by a young woman who wishes to consult with the great detective about a murder she 'might have' committed-but upon being introduced to Poirot, the girl flees. And disappears. She has shared a flat with two seemingly ordinary young women. As Hercule Poirot-with the aid of the crime novelist Mrs Ariadne Oliver-learns more about this mysterious 'third girl,' he hears rumours of revolvers, flick-knives, and blood-stains. Even if a murder might not have been committed, something is seriously wrong, and it will take all of Poirot's wits and tenacity to establish whether the 'third girl' is guilty, innocent, or insane.

Sunday Telegraph: 'First-cla.s.s Christie.'

Financial Times: 'Mesmerising ingenuity.'

36. Hallowe'en Party Hallowe'en Party (1969) (1969) Mystery writer Ariadne Oliver has been invited to a Hallowe'en party at Woodleigh Common. One of the other guests is an adolescent girl known for telling tall tales of murder and intrigue-and for being generally unpleasant. But when the girl, Joyce, is found drowned in an apple-bob-bing tub, Mrs Oliver wonders after the fictional nature of the girl's claim that she had once witnessed a murder. Which of the party guests wanted to keep her quiet is a question for Ariadne's friend Hercule Poirot. But unmasking a killer this Hallowe'en is not going to be easy-for there isn't a soul in Woodleigh who believes the late little storyteller was actually murdered.

Daily Mirror: 'A thundering success...a triumph for Hercule Poirot.'

37. Elephants Can Remember Elephants Can Remember (1972) (1972) 'The Ravenscrofts didn't seem that kind of person. They seemed well balanced and placid.'

And yet, twelve years earlier, the husband had shot the wife, and then himself-or perhaps it was the other way around, since sets of both of their fingerprints were on the gun, and the gun had fallen between them. The case haunts Ariadne Oliver, who had been a friend of the couple. The famous mystery novelist desires this real-life mystery solved, and calls upon Hercule Poirot to help her do so.Old sins have long shadows , the proverb goes. Poirot is now a very old man, but his mind is as nimble and as sharp as ever and can still penetrate deep into the shadows. But as Poirot and Mrs Oliver and Superintendent Spence reopen the long-closed case, a startling discovery awaits them. And if memory serves Poirot (and it does!), crime-like history-has a tendency to repeat itself.

The Times: 'Splendid.'

38. Poirot's Early Cases Poirot's Early Cases (1974) (1974) With his career still in its formative years, we learn many things about how Poirot came to exercise those famous 'grey cells' so well. Fourteen of the eighteen stories collected herein are narrated by Captain Arthur Hastings-including what would appear to be the earliest Poirot short story, 'The Affair at the Victory Ball,' which follows soon on the events ofThe Mysterious Affair at Styles . Two of the stories are narrated by Poirot himself, to Hastings. One, 'The Chocolate Box,' concerns Poirot's early days on the Belgian police force, and the case that was his greatest failure: 'My grey cells, they functioned not at all,'

Poirot admits. But otherwise, in this most fascinating collection, they function brilliantly, Poirot's grey cells, challenging the reader to keep pace at every twist and turn. Collected within: 'The Affair at the Victory Ball'; 'The Adventure of the Clapham Cook'; 'The Cornish Mystery'; 'The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly'; 'The Double Clue'; 'The King of Clubs'; 'The Lemesurier Inheritance'; 'The Lost Mine'; 'The Plymouth Express'; 'The Chocolate Box'; 'The Submarine Plans'; 'The Third-Floor Flat'; 'Double Sin'; 'The Market Basing Mystery'; 'Wasps' Nest'; 'The Veiled Lady'; 'Problem at Sea'; 'How Does Your Garden Grow?'

Sunday Express: 'Superb, vintage Christie.'

39. Curtain: Poirot's Last Case Curtain: Poirot's Last Case (1975) (1975) Captain Arthur Hastings narrates. Poirot investigates. 'This, Hastings, will be my last case,' declares the detective who hadentered the scene as a retiree inThe Mysterious Affair at Styles , the captain's, and our, first encounter with the now-legendary Belgian detective. Poirot promises that, 'It will be, too, my most interesting case-and my most interesting criminal. For in X we have a technique superb, magnificent...X has operated with so much ability that he has defeated me, Hercule Poirot!' The setting is, appropriately, Styles Court, which has since been converted into a private hotel. And under this same roof is X, a murderer five-times over; a murderer by no means finished murdering. InCurtain , Poirot will, at last, retire-death comes as the end. And he will bequeath to his dear friend Hastings an astounding revelation. 'The ending ofCurtain is one of the most surprising that Agatha Christie ever devised,' writes her biographer, Charles...o...b..rne.

Of note: On 6 August 1975, upon the publication ofCurtain ,The New York Times ran a front-page obituary of Hercule Poirot, complete with photograph. The pa.s.sing of no other fictional character had been so acknowledged in America's 'paper of record.' Agatha Christie had always intendedCurtain to be 'Poirot's Last Case': Having written the novel during the Blitz, she stored it (heavily insured) in a bank vault till the time that she, herself, would retire. Agatha Christie died on 12 January 1976.

Time: 'First-rate Christie: fast, complicated, wryly funny.'

Charles...o...b..rne on One, Two, Buckle My Shoe Alternative t.i.tle:The Patriotic Murders Poirot (1940) A highly successful example of the murder mystery inspired by nursery rhyme, the category which Agatha Christie virtually invented and certainly made her speciality,One, Two, Buckle My Shoe is prefaced by the rhyme itself: One, two, buckle my shoe, Three, four, shut the door, Five, six, pick up sticks,4 Seven, eight, lay them straight, Nine, ten, a good fat hen, Eleven, twelve, men must delve, Thirteen, fourteen, maids are courting, Fifteen, sixteen, maids in the kitchen, Seventeen, eighteen, maids in waiting, Nineteen, twenty, my plate's empty.

Each of the novel's ten chapters corresponds, loosely, to a line of the verse: the shoe buckle of the first line is not without significance. The first person to die is an apparently harmless London dentist, with a fashionable practice in Harley Street. He is at first thought to have committed suicide, but he seemed in good spirits when Hercule Poirot was a patient in his chair an hour or so before his death, and so Poirot joins his old colleague Chief Inspector j.a.pp in investigating the affair, which soon proves to have wider ramifications than were at first foreseen. International politics may be involved, hence the change of t.i.tle for US publication toThe Patriotic Murders . (An American paperback reprint in 1953 used a third t.i.tle: An Overdose of Death .) This is one of those Christie crime novels whosedonnee the reader would be wise to scrutinize very closely, for things are not necessarily what they seem. The plot is a particularly complicated one but is clearly and unconfusingly presented, except at moments when Mrs. Christie intends to confuse. References to politics and to international intrigue abound, but they are both more specific and somewhat more sophisticated than in such Agatha Christie thrillers of the twenties asThe Seven Dials Mystery and The Big Four . Left-wing agitators are more lightly satirized, conservative financiers no longer have to be treated as sacrosanct, both 'the Reds' and 'our Blackshirted friends' (Mosley's Fascists) are seen as threats to democracy, and there is even a mention of the IRA. References are to the real world of 1939, teetering on the brink of war, and not to a cosily recalled, more stable past. It is odd, surely, that Poirot, who has elsewhere described himself asbon catholique , should have known his way around the Anglican forms of service sufficiently to take part, even if 'in a hesitant baritone', in the chanting of Psalm 140 when he accompanies a family to morning prayers in the parish church. 'The proud hath laid a snare for me,' he sang, 'and spread a net with cards; yea, and set traps in my way,' and suddenly he sees clearly the trap into which he had so nearly fallen. It is comforting to think that Poirot has derived some benefit from his visit, for this is the only church service he is known to have attended in the course of his abnormally long career.

Walking through Regent's Park at one point in the story, Poirot notices young lovers sitting under 'nearly every tree'. He compared the figures of the 'little London girls' unfavourably with that of the Countess Vera Rossokoff, a Russian aristocrat and thief whose path had crossed his many years earlier inThe Big Four , and who has lingered in his thoughts and dreams ever since. The Countess plays no part inOne, Two, Buckle My Shoe , but she will appear again, seven years later, inThe Labours of Hercules . Elsewhere during his investigation Poirot recalls another of his cases, one 'that he had named the Case of the Augean Stables'. This, along with the other labours of Hercules, had not yet been collected into a volume, but will be found in 1947'sThe Labours of Hercules .

A television adaptation ofOne, Two, Buckle My Shoe , with David Suchet as Poirot, was first transmitted on London Weekend TV on 19 January 1992.

About Charles...o...b..rne

This essay was adapted from Charles...o...b..rne'sThe Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A Biographical Companion to the Works of Agatha Christie (1982, rev. 1999). Mr. Osborne was born in Brisbane in 1927. He is known internationally as an authority on opera, and has written a number of books on musical and literary subjects, among themThe Complete Operas of Verdi (1969);Wagner and His World (1977); andW.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet (1980). An addict of crime fiction and the world's leading authority on Agatha Christie, Charles...o...b..rne adapted the Christie playsBlack Coffee (Poirot);Spider's Web ; andThe Unexpected Guest into novels. He lives in London.

About Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie is known throughout the world as the Queen of Crime. Her books have sold over a billion copies in English and another billion in 100 foreign languages. She is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Mrs Christie is the author of eighty crime novels and short story collections, nineteen plays, and six novels written under the name of Mary Westmacott.

Agatha Christie's first novel,The Mysterious Affair at Styles , was written towards the end of World War I (during which she served in the Voluntary Aid Detachments). In it she created Hercule Poirot, the little Belgian investigator who was destined to become the most popular detective in crime fiction since Sherlock Holmes. After having been rejected by a number of houses,The Mysterious Affair at Styles was eventually published by The Bodley Head in 1920.

In 1926, now averaging a book a year, Agatha Christie wrote her masterpiece.The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was the first of her books to be published by William Collins and marked the beginning of an author-publisher relationship that lasted for fifty years and produced over seventy books.The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was also the first of Agatha Christie's works to be dramatised-asAlibi -and to have a successful run in London's West End.The Mousetrap , her most famous play, opened in 1952 and runs to this day at St Martin's Theatre in the West End; it is the longest-running play in history. Agatha Christie was made a Dame in 1971. She died in 1976, since when a number of her books have been published: the bestselling novelSleeping Murder appeared in 1976, followed byAn Autobiography and the short story collectionsMiss Marple's Final Cases ;Problem at Pollensa Bay ; andWhile the Light Lasts . In 1998,Black Coffee was the first of her plays to be novelised by Charles...o...b..rne, Mrs Christie's biographer.

The Agatha Christie Collection

Christie Crime Cla.s.sics The Man in the Brown Suit The Secret of Chimneys The Seven Dials Mystery The Mysterious Mr Quin The Sittaford Mystery The Hound of Death The Listerdale Mystery Why Didn't They Ask Evans?

Parker Pyne Investigates Murder Is Easy And Then There Were None Towards Zero Death Comes as the End Sparkling Cyanide Crooked House They Came to Baghdad Destination Unknown Spider's Web *

The Unexpected Guest *

Ordeal by Innocence The Pale Horse Endless Night Pa.s.senger To Frankfurt Problem at Pollensa Bay While the Light Lasts Hercule Poirot Investigates The Mysterious Affair at Styles The Murder on the Links Poirot Investigates The Murder of Roger Ackroyd The Big Four The Mystery of the Blue Train Black Coffee *

Peril at End House Lord Edgware Dies Murder on the Orient Express Three-Act Tragedy Death in the Clouds The ABC Murders Murder in Mesopotamia Cards on the Table Murder in the Mews Dumb Witness Death on the Nile Appointment with Death Hercule Poirot's Christmas Sad Cypress One, Two, Buckle My Shoe Evil Under the Sun Five Little Pigs The Hollow The Labours of Hercules Taken at the Flood Mrs McGinty's Dead After the Funeral Hickory d.i.c.kory Dock Dead Man's Folly Cat Among the Pigeons The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding The Clocks Third Girl Hallowe'en Party Elephants Can Remember Poirot's Early Cases Curtain: Poirot's Last Case Miss Marple Mysteries The Murder at the Vicarage The Thirteen Problems The Body in the Library The Moving Finger A Murder Is Announced They Do It with Mirrors A Pocket Full of Rye 4.50 from Paddington The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side A Caribbean Mystery At Bertram's Hotel Nemesis Sleeping Murder Miss Marple's Final Cases Tommy & Tuppence The Secret Adversary Partners in Crime N or M?

By the p.r.i.c.king of My Thumbs Postern of Fate Published as Mary Westmacott Giant's Bread Unfinished Portrait Absent in the Spring The Rose and the Yew Tree A Daughter's a Daughter The Burden Memoirs An Autobiography Come, Tell Me How You Live Play Collections The Mousetrap and Selected Plays Witness for the Prosecution and Selected Plays